The Asus ROG Ally is set to be launched in the next couple of weeks on 11 May! Basically, it is a competitor to the Steam Deck, and it looks to be more compact too with the “fastest AMD APU yet” in the form of the AMD Ryzen Z1 – or Z1 Extreme – with RDNA 3 graphics.

If we were to take Asus’ claim at face value, the ROG Ally may just offer better gaming performance over the Steam Deck, given that the latter is also powered by an AMD APU, Aerith. The Ally also has a higher resolution 7-inch 1920 x 1080 display with a 120Hz refresh rate, while the Steam Deck has lower resolution 60Hz panel, though it has a taller 16:10 aspect ratio.

Aside from that, the ROG Ally can also be connected to the (proprietary) ROG XG Mobile external GPU enclosure for higher fidelity gaming. It’s said to run on Windows 11 as well, so it’ll be interesting to see how this would impact the battery life of the handheld gaming console.

Other specifications of the Ally include up to 16GB of LPDDR5 dual-channel RAM and 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD – this is said to be upgradable – a microSD card slot for further storage expansion, as well as a lightweight chassis that tips the scales at 608g.

The Asus ROG Ally will debut in the next couple of weeks on 11 May. The launch event will take place at 10PM Malaysian time on that day, and hopefully, we’ll find out then if the handheld gaming console will be coming to Malaysia.